The Newberry Library Borderlands and Latino Studies Seminar, January 25, 2013: Mike Amezcua and Andrew Sandoval-Strausz

3 to 5 pm

“Out in the Cold: Urban Radicals, Deportations, and the Mexican Great Migration in Early Cold War Chicago”
Mike Amezcua, Northwestern University

“Latino Landscapes in Chicago: Transnational History, Architecture, and the Origins of a New Urban America”
Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, University of New Mexico

My article-in-progress uses the history of the South Lawndale community area on Chicago’s West Side as a case study of the Latinization of the U.S. landscape. The historiography of urban America since 1950 remains bounded by the nation-state even after forty years in which the most important forces acting on cities have operated across borders. I argue that the past few decades have seen a transnational transformation of American cities that calls for a new phase in urban history—one in which Latinos take their place at the center of a revised and decentered narrative of national and international development.

Commentator: Ralph Cintron, University of Illinois at Chicago

See event website for additional information.